


Walking Far From Home: Still Dry

by wilySubversionist



Series: Walking Far from Home [7]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Kismesis?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-19
Updated: 2011-08-19
Packaged: 2017-10-22 19:44:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/241853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wilySubversionist/pseuds/wilySubversionist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It’s hard to bow so low when you’re suspended in the sky, in the sea."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walking Far From Home: Still Dry

**Author's Note:**

> _I saw children in a river  
>  but their lips were still dry, lips were still dry_

There are no maps of this place because it writhes out from under itself, thermal vents spewing and kicking and sliding. There are no legends or lore of the fish here, monstrous armored things that sometimes surface through sopor, because they are bigger and stronger and speedier than any troll who would seek them. And those were rare because under the waves and in the stars, there were more important things less bleak and breaking along the surface.

It’s horrible place, hot and cold and endless pressure squeezing in so hard it cracks ribs with a careless breath —a mistake you make every time, forgetting what’s already automatic— and it’s so dark. Dark enough, if you turn too quickly, or don’t mind your bearings, you’ll lose the path back to the sky. Horrible.

And that’s where you go, because that’s where you’ll find her.

*****

She’s exquisite when she’s angry, and she’s angry all the time now. Desire rattles in your chest and you want to spit gobs of it into the ocean, but she’s shaking-pissed and too beautiful to look at, so you swallow it down and watch her wake. From above, you can see the ripples her body whips out even as the sudden cloudburst peppers the waves; she owns every drop, and she’s calling them home with the violence of her voice.

The carcass of the sharp-beaked bird rocks and floats on great white wings still and she bobs up and down beside it, each shout lifting her shoulders and smearing her with the cerulean slick topping the sea for miles around. When you look from her to it —yes, the lusus of her friend Lyrsan, _your_ friend Lyrsan— you lick your lips, neutral. A fearsome thing, that beast you killed and you feel broad-shouldered and tall and fearsome for killing it. She’s loudly calling for limits, here where the sea and the sky are slamdancing, where you know better than boundaries. The harpoon used is already reset in the notch, the rain diluting blood dripping down your hand.

Yes, you know what else came with too, know it better than she can, but she screams it over and over and over and over again. Eyes open and fixed on the erratic surface, you imagine, can _see_ the blue-stained body sliding in and mashed between pincers in its choppy mirror. She’s not wrong (it is terrible and you’re shocked at yourself, shocked and proud) but neither are you, and that’s why she’s hoarse and pale.

She says she’ll hate you for it, hate you forever; it stings, yet you know she just hates seeing it, hates the feel of brushing up against your part of the plan. Every reminder is like the first gulp of salt air after so long under, bitter and icy, arid and shocking. She hates it —and you, over and over and over again— but she wants the air, too, the ocean and the air and the damp foreign earth.

She wants to be queen so you‘ll let her be queen, offering up your tribute in little acts of reclamation: pushing the water back, wrestling its edge with calculations and cogs and sharp sluicing hooks. You’re building her a drydock with bodies for rivets, making a space where she can be gentle. A way to hold the whole world like a glass bauble in her soft, joyful hands. The whole world and everyone in it, give or take a few.

There’s no way, no way you’ll ever choose a rock-fed almost-stranger over her, over her pretty dream that you’ve sidled into and loved because it was warm and rosy. You’ll always get harder so she can be gentle: you tell her so and she believes. Her face is more bearable now, only lovely, a little sad and scared. You know, but don’t say, how hard it is to want something completely new.

So when she clamps down and tears up and dives, tearing a path of fine bubbles towards the harshest deep, a place that will rip the kindness out of you both, you choke and swallow it down and chase her into the black water.

*****

Groping with one hand in front, you swim down and down and towards what you think must be the floor of the world, afraid to bump it. But it never comes and eventually you can’t see anything, only feel strange cold currents and sudden hot blasts swirling you around. Orientation is a litany: _my feet are in the air, my head towards the ground, my left arm is up and my feet are now down_. Each change in the water, the ripping of deep tides threatens to lock you down with panic and make you forget yourself, but you’re a quicker thinker than swimmer. You will be fine.

But already that’s a lie and twined with the frantic need to find her, reach her and shake her with the lines you’re rehearsing in between the whispered directional flow. It starts as an apology, then apologia —all the ways you could fall at her knees and win her back to the world— but in the stifling suede sea at the bottom of everything, you know you aren’t sorry. You’re just sick of looking.

So then: _fef listen I know it’s bad, fef it has to be like this, facing down heading west, fef I know it hurts you, so let me carry it, let me serve, now north, let me be strong_. The will to rise, to climb and triumph and be big enough to lift her on a new throne of carved pearls and polished abalone, it’s so strong you feel your buoyancy shift. You’re worried you can’t get any deeper when you still thirst so badly for clouds.

You’re facing up again, you think; you think of the eagle-lusus high above the water as it spots the fish, and you sighting the eagle with your own dagger-sharp vision. The joy in hunting, winning, bringing home something she can use. You grinned as the harpoon sang through the sky, thinking of winning her smile that never came. It was the best of you, all you could give, so why does she want your shame instead? It’s hard to bow so low when you’re suspended in the sky, in the sea.

Leathery against your fingertips, your palm, inexplicably sharp at edges you can’t see, the leviathan in the dark ahead of you only barely makes itself known: you recoil and try to brake and freeze, icy and still. You pray, silently pleading with the void you are too small for it to notice, try to shrink, fold up. You can feel the water inside your gills hum, and you wait, floating, for it to pass, when there is no way of knowing if it has.

Orientation is a myth, your mind a top spinning through endless quiet— there’s nothing to think about except your pulse. And her and her and how she came here, the last oubliette of her liquid palace, to kill you. You know it all the way down. She wants you dead, or broken down to restackable blocks she’ll arrange how she likes, or maybe she’s twisted your dedication into an inky violet stream she wants running through her reign. Bile-bitter thoughts more crushing than the ocean on your chest, you dart headwards, maybe upwards, maybe beastwards, desperate to escape.

You know you’ll make it, minutes and hours of climbing back to feel the sting of squalling sleet on your face, but you’ll get there. You can feel your kicking feet walking gingerly across the bruised earth already. But there’s a light, a star in the deep coming at you fast before you even start to ascend. When you see her in its center, you forget the surface: you won’t see it again.

*****

She’s so luminous you’re afraid she’s making to attack, gorgeous righteous fury and a three-pronged negation, repudiating earth and sky and you. You’re angry too for an instant, mean to make a stand; but your pride is a brittle thing, and you throw yourself all around her and her mercy, murmuring how glad you are for her light, how sorry you’ve been, here alone in the dark.

There’s a shift in her glow, more milky now, moonlight-on-sand like she's never seen, and as she comes closer it’s clear she isn’t here to punish. Rescue, instead, claiming you and leading you through her black gardens at the heart of what’s hers. She’s taking you into her care, and you feel bruise-tender and reach for her, clinging for a life vest and a red caress. You pull her close, but her eyes are vacant and her mouth a snarl.

Your name on her lips is an apostate’s cursing prayer, and your heart is in your throat. She’d shred it if she could.

Still, you grasp her close, hanging on to her arm, her shoulder for dear life even though she’s saw-edged and sharp as a dragon’s tooth. The beat of the water, pulsing from crumbling rock and cracking seabed —her doing, she’ll rip it down, break the whole world apart— nearly drowns out her sour-sweet voice as she renames you: _traitor, oathbreaker, murderer, coward, fool_. She has every right, had she met you in the blackness then and certainly now as you see her with new bleached eyes: she is your princess, your pretty regicide, a primrose stain on your hands that won't ever wash. All around, the taste of rosewater and the scent of blood, sweeter than sea air.

She’s still under your hand when she shouts again, over and over and over again, your faults, your crimes, your love: _I would have made her speak, I’d kill us all before I’d have ever let you touch me_. Oh, she sings truth instead of speaking it, and you let your hope she would do it now ride her melody. You hope you’d both die, die again in this icy embrace. You will not let go; her trident bites into your thigh, but you don’t let go.

Her nails in your face, so close to hers you could —could and would and will— kiss, you snake your hand to grasp her throat. Your thumb’s on her pulse and your fingers in her gills; a flex and you hear the little bones snap, crinkled under your claws. She wails and wails and you grin with broken fangs and porphyry streaming from her hands. Her hands and your face, your colors blending and brightening the sea. The difference in the shades is dim; she still is your only light, throwing white sparks all around you.

When you kiss finally, your broken mouths are open; she’s gasping, crippled and trying to do what her body wasn’t meant to by sucking the depths into her lungs— she’s lost her claim here, you stole it. Her struggling, or yours, spins you both, rolls you over and over and over again. You’re remaking the currents of the sea, you two together, the currents and the colors and you wait, wait to hear the last booming call of her power, feel the shockwave that will end this moment. Maybe it will never come. Maybe you’ll be caged here together, locked in each other’s arms and teeth and claws, past the death of the world.

**Author's Note:**

> Hoooo boy, a return to WFFH after so long, it feels very odd and clean and good. I hope it reads that way, too.
> 
> This is essentially a massive songfic, incorporating basically everything I've ever heard, but especially this: [Oceanographer's Choice.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPjbloNJQUE)


End file.
